The present invention pertains, in general, to a method and system for capturing and then displaying wide-screen images using components which are readily available. Standard video cameras, camcorders, video cassette recorders and standard television sets may be used in implementing the present invention.
Wide-screen images are those images which have a panoramic aspect or those which are customarily used in cinema. Such images normally have much greater width than height. As such, wide-screen images are not amenable to display on standard television sets. The aspect ratio (or ratio width to height) for a television set which conforms to FCC standards is four to three (4:3). This familiar shape is not as wide as a cinema screen, for a given screen height.
Video cameras which conform to the FCC standards for television also have the 4:3 aspect ratio. Thus, standard video cameras are no more suitable for capturing wide-screen images than standard television sets are for displaying them.
Turning now to a discussion of the history of cinema formats, it is noted that since the 1950's, when motion picture producers first sought to lure the public away from their televisions, a number of wide-screen cinema systems have been popular. The first of these, and the one most similar in result to the video system described herein, was Cinerama (tm), which combined three higher-than-wide film images into a continuous panorama projected onto a deeply curved screen covering an angle (both taken and projected) of nearly 150 lateral degrees, at an aggregate aspect ratio of 2.66:1.
Although popular at the time, Cinerama was too expensive and impractical for most film production. It's success, however, did lead to the development of other standards, such as anamorphic 35 mm cinematography, in which cylindrical lenses compressed the horizontal field of the image taken during cinematography. Cylindrical lenses also were used to spread the image in projection. As standardized, these anamorphic 35 mm cinematography systems yielded a projected aspect ratio of 2.4:1.
Other responses to Cinerama included the so-called "wide-format 70 mm" systems such as Todd-AO (tm). Super Panavision (tm), Super Technirama (tm), and Ultra-Panavision (tm). With the exception of the latter (now obsolete), these formats yielded an aspect ratio of 2.21:1 and provided six discrete channels of audio.
The other wide screen format, currently the most common, is simple frame masking, in which the 35 mm 4:3 image is matted either in photography or projection to a ratio of approximately 1.85:1.
Thus, a number of wide-screen formats have found favor in the cinema, and all of them are too wide to display on a standard television. Put another way, television equipment which conforms to FCC standards cannot be used for recording or displaying these wide-screen images. If it is desired to capture an image having an aspect ratio of greater than 4.3, video cameras and television sets which conform to FCC standards cannot be used.
In the prior art, attempts to accommodate this lack of (aspect ratio) compatibility have generally proven unsatisfactory. At least one television manufacturer, ProScan (tm), produced televisions with tubes having aspect ratios of greater than 2:1. These televisions have tended to be very expensive to produce, since special electronic processing was needed to accommodate television broadcasts which conform to FCC standards as well as accommodating special broadcasts which have been "letter-boxed".
Letter-boxing is an attempt at adapting cinema images to the 4:3 television displays by wasting space. For letter-box processing, the cinema image is recorded with black bands above and below the cinema image to render a result which uses all of the television screen's width but does not use all of the height, thus adapting a 2.66:1 image to a 4:3 display. The result is a tiny movie screen with poor resolution of the cinema image's details.
Another approach to compensating for the incompatibility between standard television and cinema image sizes is the uncorrected distortion of an anamorphic cinematic image, which maintains the vertical aspect of the captured image while compressing the width or horizontal aspect of the image. This gives a badly distorted "fun house mirror" character to the cinematic image.
All of these efforts have proved unsatisfactory, either because the reproduced image size is too small or because the reproduced image size is badly distorted. This gives rise to a need for some way to record or transcribe wide-screen images using standard television componentry. Television video cameras, camcorders and television sets are most desirable since the standard television components are produced in great numbers and are therefore available at economical prices.